


For the Birds

by dellaxstreet



Series: If You Give A Supe A Paycheck [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Ass-Kicking, Awesome Darcy Lewis, Doombots, Drinking, Female Friendship, Gen, Penguins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2017-11-17
Packaged: 2019-02-03 17:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12753021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaxstreet/pseuds/dellaxstreet
Summary: Darcy had made her peace with the fact that unusual things could and would always happen near her, but sometimes? Sometimes it was annoying. Sometimes, it sent her into a state somewhere between terrified and furious.Sometimes, you were a block from home, when danger shuffled around the corner and began slicing at pedestrians with razor-sharp wingtips before launching itself into the air. Sometimes, Dr. Doom decided to be a complete and total asshole. “Penguins don’t fly! If you’re gonna be a corny jerkoff, be consistent!”Featuring: Doombots, female ass-kicking, and a lot of whiskey.





	For the Birds

Not taking Tony’s offer to move into the tower full-time, Darcy sometimes thought, had been a mistake. At the time, she’d just wanted a place where she could walk around in her underwear and not worry about being interrupted by superheroes who had serious boundary problems, or keep a well-stocked stash of junk food without having to beat men with hyperactive metabolisms off with a stick. Thor had once tried to take the last Pop Tart and discovered it was a literal stick.

SHIELD had been great when it came to finding her a studio apartment a manageable distance away. Given that there was no way she could have afforded the place without selling both her kidneys under normal circumstances, she could only assume they owned the building, and that all her neighbors were probably also employees. The hipster couple across the hall had tried to sell her on vegan carrot cake, but they were nice enough.

The problem with not living where she worked was, well, that sometimes between the subway stop and her apartment building, the fact that she was a danger magnet reared its ugly head. Darcy had made her peace with the fact that unusual things could and would always happen near her, but sometimes? Sometimes it was annoying. Sometimes, it sent her into a state somewhere between terrified and furious.

Sometimes, you were a block from home, when danger shuffled around the corner and began slicing at pedestrians with razor-sharp wingtips before launching itself into the air. Sometimes, Dr. Doom decided to be a complete and total asshole. “Penguins don’t fly! If you’re gonna be a corny jerkoff, be consistent!”

Scrambling backward, Darcy seized hold of the taser in her purse first, hands shaking as she tried to hold it steady. Overhead, penguin-shaped Doombots were wreaking havoc on the street lights and power lines, sending one crashing downward toward her as she was forced to dive out of the way.

“Get away from me. I mean it. I’ll tase you until you wish you’d been made into a Cylon-shaped toaster, birdbrain!” The quaver in her voice undercut the threat, but as one lunged for her, wings outstretched, she managed to pull the trigger in time.

The Penguinbot fell to the sidewalk, twitching. As one, every other bot in her line of sight wheeled around, diving or waddling in her direction. “Oh, come on! Don’t you have anything better to do! Aren’t you supposed to be like, reversing street signs and stealing left socks?”

Knees trembling, Darcy barely managed to duck and roll out of the way of the oncoming swarm. This was not what her combat training with Natasha was supposed to be for. And she hadn’t even really progressed past the point where she was letting the Widow turn her into a walking bruise yet! Muscle memory or no, she was very, very bad at actual fighting, possibly because her figure was just not suited to the combat arts.

One of them had shredded her sleeve on the way past. She’d liked this jacket! “You’re such assholes! And so is Dr. Doom! Do you hear me? DR. DOOM IS A CLOTHING-RUINING ASSHOLE!”

Faintly, she noticed the note of hysteria climbing into her voice, but she had to think through this, she couldn’t just. Cower in the street, not when Penguinbots further away were clearly wreaking havoc on traffic and Thor knew what else. She was Darcy Lewis. She had once tased the god of thunder. She feared no man _or_ machine.

This was some Alfred Hitchcock bullshit. Ducking out of the way of yet another aerial assault, she kicked out and managed to land a solid blow on the nearest advancing Penguinbot, sending it flying backward. Not much of a victory, but she’d take it.

Wait, she had a weapon for this. _She had a weapon for this._

Part of the agreement wherein Tony Stark was not allowed to rework Darcy’s taser to surpass things which would render it ‘no longer street legal’ and ‘capable of killing a man’ was not only getting Natasha to teach her some defensive techniques, but a round of training alongside her and Clint both with something a little more nonlethal.

The baton snapped out to full length in her hand as Darcy dropped her purse to the sidewalk for now and swung around, hearing steel collide with steel as three more went wheeling over backwards. These little bastards didn’t have kneecaps, but they had to have a weakness _someplace._ Maybe if she aimed at where their wings met their bodies…?

“Jesus fuck, this city is insane!” A woman’s voice came from behind her, rough with annoyance. As Darcy turned to look, her gaze fell on a brunette in a leather jacket who jumped up to snatch one of the Penguinbots out of midair. It struggled against her grip, until she ripped its head off and tossed both pieces to the ground. “The hell do I look like, Captain America? This is not my job!”

As the woman ran past her, she paused, gaze flicking over Darcy. “You look like you’re about to pass out,” she remarked, expression managing to convey that she was thoroughly unimpressed.

Raising her baton to knock more of the irritating things away before they could tear her to ribbons, Darcy got out through gritted teeth, “I really don’t like penguins!”

Midway through stomping one of the bots into tin foil, the woman snorted. “Penguins? Really? Who’s afraid of penguins?”

It wasn’t a rational fear, Darcy knew. Everyone probably had one thing that scared them as much as penguins had always bothered her, though they were able to put it down to a slightly more rational cause. She’d never jumped away from spiders or other bugs, which was good considering the amount of time she’d spent in the desert, even if Jane hated arachnids and made her do the daily shoe-checking ritual back in the day. It was just that penguins didn’t seem right.

To her childish brain, they had always seemed like they were up to something. Maybe it was that they looked like they were wearing clothing. Maybe it was the unnatural way they waddled, and didn’t ever take to the air. An ostritch or an emu was logical to be afraid of because they genuinely could kill you, but penguins joined that category in Darcy’s mind. They were not to be trusted, and now a city full of penguins was trying to take her out. She was vindicated.

As usual, her mind ran away with her mouth, and what she said in response was, “Anybody who’s ever seen Danny De Vito with flippers is afraid of penguins! Now come on, put up or shut up!” Knocking one of the bots into a telephone pole afforded her enough time to drive the point of the baton down through its little mechanical brain, stopping it for good.

Superwoman stopped long enough to dig a flask out of her pocket, take a long swig, and nod. “You knock ‘em to me, I can take ‘em down and leave ‘em that way.”

Between the two of them, they managed to clear the swarm which had taken over the street with surprising efficiency. Superwoman, or whatever her real name was, had enough strength that once or twice when a Penguinbot tried to get away, she simply jumped _off_ the top of a parked car and slammed it headlong into the wall of the nearest building. And when they hit the ground, they didn’t get back up.

Darcy even managed to take a wing or two off the bots, which sent them into a death spiral that her new partner in crime fighting could use to her advantage. The whole time, she maintained an look bearing varying degrees of annoyance. Between that and the flask, she made it pretty clear that she wasn’t the kind of person who liked having to get up to heroics. Given what that’d do to a normal person’s wardrobe bill, she couldn’t say she blamed the woman.

“I’m Darcy,” she offered, when they had finally stopped, breathing heavily. “Darcy Lewis.” The swarm of Penguinbots elsewhere were being taken out by the Avengers, if the distant sound of thunder was any indication. Thor no doubt thought this was an excellent game. Maybe they’d even gotten Falcon to show up and fight his bird brethren.

“Did I ask?” the woman answered her, eyebrows raised, but didn’t immediately retreat. Instead, she took another long swig from her flask, then stuffed it back into a pocket and walked over to stick a hand out. “Jessica Jones.”

That name rang a bell, from a little while back. Something about the wariness in Jessica’s eyes said she was hoping that Darcy didn’t connect the dots, though, so instead she smiled, shook her hand and said, “I don’t live too far, if you want to come along. You helped save my ass, the least I can do is pour you a drink.”

For a moment, the wariness deepened in that gaze, before her mouth turned down and she shrugged. “As long as you don’t want to braid my hair and talk about boys. I don’t go in for that shit.”

Picking her purse back up, Darcy kept the baton out just in case for now, stepping around the twitching remains of a Penguinbot as she led the way to her apartment building. Jessica followed along behind her, hands stuck in her pockets, managing to look both gun-shy and like she absolutely dared anyone to say something about it all at once.

Oh! This was the woman who’d made the papers not too long ago for taking out that crazy mind controlling villain, wasn’t she? He’d had some name that said ‘I want to sound edgy without putting any effort in’, what was it… Kilgrave sounded right. They’d had to argue that she’d killed him in self-defense because he had other people hostage or something. All of which sounded like it’d be enough to make anyone drink.

She knew that particular look now that she’d recognized it. Sometimes, when Clint had to interact with SHIELD agents who didn’t know enough about him, they treated him badly and he got this faraway look in his eyes. It was like watching someone put up a front and be vulnerable at the exact same time, because they’d been somewhere they never wanted to go again. It was enough to make Darcy want to punch Loki in the face if he ever showed up again (she didn’t for a second believe he was actually gone).

“The hair-braiding and boy-talking involves tequila, Ben and Jerry’s, and sometimes convincing Thor that if he wants to partake in our Earthly female bonding rituals he should also have his toenails painted. He likes it a lot more than you’d think.” She couldn’t help but grin at the snort that got out of her companion. “My best friend’s dating Thor, so he gets invited to girls’ night more than you’d think. For our purposes, though… I think ass-kicking calls for whiskey.”

One glass of whiskey, once they’d settled inside the apartment, didn’t feel nearly sufficient for the occasion of almost dying at the flippers of killer robotic penguins. “If you want another round, I can tell you about the time I convinced Jarvis to speak total gibberish just so I could show up the next day and say ‘It’s okay, I speak jive’.”

By the time three glasses had been consumed even Jessica, who clearly had a liver of steel, was loosening up enough to laugh openly at her stories. It made Darcy’s heart warm, to see the armor slide down just a tiny bit. Oh, she still swore like a sailor and proclaimed twice that this didn’t make them friends or anything, but she didn’t care. She’d win the prickly woman over eventually.

“How did you not end up dead, exactly? Even I know you don’t fuck with Nick Fury,” Jessica was saying, after another round of anecdotes, though from her attentive gaze Darcy knew she was hanging on every word.

“I told him that I was wearing an eyepatch in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, and also because I wanted to celebrate his visionary fashion choices. He gave me a look that could peel paint, and then...” She choked on a laugh. “Then he told me to inform him before I celebrated it next year, so that he could prepare accordingly. And no one would believe me if I told them!”

Finishing the contents of her glass, Jessica snorted audibly. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

At that exact moment, a flurry of knocking on her front door began. Sliding off the sofa, Darcy hurried to answer it, as the knocking became more and more insistent. By the time she was undoing the deadbolt, she could hear someone on the other side saying, “If you’re home in one piece, get out here, now!”

The door swung inward to reveal Natasha standing on her doorstep, hand on one hip. “Lewis. The city was invaded by Dr. Doom and an army of robots, and you don’t answer your phone?”

Meekly, Darcy offered, “Sorry. I forgot to check it when I got home. I kind of got sidetracked trying not to get killed by the Penguinbots, and then I met Jessica, and we kicked their collective asses, so I offered her a drink… or three… I was going to tell you guys I was fine. Honest.”

Natasha leaned around her, to take in the figure of Jessica propped up on the sofa, pouring herself another whiskey, and then settled her gaze on Darcy again. For just a moment, she let all of her considerable attention come to bear on the shorter woman, just enough to make her point, and then relented, dropping into a noticeably more relaxed posture. “You’re lucky I convinced Jane to send me. The boys wanted to roll in guns blazing.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “I can take care of myself. I even helped take out all the Penguinbots who came after me, and all I needed was an assist from a badass lady. Someday they’ll all realize that.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow, but the corners of her mouth twitched in faint amusement. Striding into the apartment with all the confidence of a woman who assumes no one will have the nerve to throw her out of one again, she dropped down onto the sofa and nodded to the other woman. “Natasha Romanov. And you are?”

Darcy busied herself finding a third glass, while Jessica looked Nat over, clearly assessing what kind of threat the spy posed to her. Really, it was like they were both doing the same to the other, a fact that was enough to warm her too. Her new friend had her own things to be wary of, no doubt, but Jessica seemed to be trying to work out if this woman was safe just as Nat wanted to know if this woman could be trusted.

The standoff ended when she stuck out a hand. “Jessica Jones.”

Watching them shake on it, Darcy handed Nat a glass and settled in. “I was just telling her the Talk Like A Pirate Day story. I totally think this year, we should get the whole building to dress up, and if it goes sideways, you can just all say that it was my idea. I survived once before, after all!”

Sipping at her whiskey, Jessica laughed. “Take pictures. Please, please take pictures.”

Clapping her on the shoulder, Natasha’s gaze achieved a steely glint that seemed suddenly all-too-mischievous. “I can think of a few things we can do to go along with that.”

It occurred to Darcy as the plan began to unfold before her that she would never again underestimate which of the Avengers was capable of causing the most chaos if sufficiently motivated.


End file.
